Perhaps ‘peace’ is like ‘happiness’, ‘justice’, ‘health’ and other human ideals, something every
person and culture claims to desire and venerate, but which few if any achieve, at least on an
enduring basis. Why are peace, justice and happiness so desirable, but also so intangible and
elusive? But perhaps peace is different from happiness, since it seems to require social harmony
and political enfranchisement, whereas happiness appears, at least in Western culture, to be
largely an individual matter.
Alternatively, perhaps peace does indeed resemble individual happiness – always there,
implicit in our psychological make-up and intermittently explicit in our social behaviour and
cultural norms. Peace is a pre-condition for our emotional well-being, but a peaceful state of
mind is subject to cognitive disruptions and aggressive eruptions.
Peace is a linchpin of social harmony, economic equity and political justice, but peace is also